Let me give you a little background first. I've been studying Buddhism for about, well, more than ten years, maybe twelve years, something like that. I've been practicing meditation with Suzuki Roshi for about eight years, I guess, and during part of that time I was in Oriental Studies at the University of California. So there's been a long time interest in ... you can't hear me up there, so put up your hand or something. So there's been a long time interest on my part in the Orient. And I knew most of the cliches about the differences and things like that, but the more I studied and practiced Buddhism and got in contact with the Olympics, the more I found the differences were more different than I imagined. And during the last eight years I've worked pretty closely with Suzuki Roshi, the Zen master who's here, head of Zen Center, and on working with him on his lectures on the Wind Bell, which is a publication, and many other

[01:25]

situations, trying to develop Tassajara, the Zen Mountain Center, down near Big Sur. And each time we'd come to some close… I mean, we'd be working quite intimately, trying to decide about something, our minds would go like that, you know. They never quite came together, and no matter… particularly if we had a feeling of some mutual understanding, if we even say that we nearly And we finally bridged the gap, so it seemed like that. Then when we tried to express what our understanding was, it went back out at different angles, you know, because his cultural vocabulary was different from mine. I mean, he's one of the few Japanese persons I've ever met who seems reasonably free, in fact, by far the freest. you know, like he knows the other alternatives of a cultural vocabulary, you know, the Western or the American, then he can, well, sure, that's a good way and the Japanese way is a good way. But if he doesn't know that, then he tends to express his expectations in terms of an Oriental cultural vocabulary.

[02:54]

Anyway, I went to Japan, having some idea what the menu was, and the meal was even more than I expected. And I spent the last year in a kind of, I'd say, cultural confrontation. Rather than study Buddhism so much, I wandered around and went to movies and visited places, and sometimes wearing Buddhist robes and sometimes not, to see what happened in various situations. And I discussed everything I could with other foreigners living in Japan and with several Japanese persons I made very close contact with. One in particular, Nagasaki Sensei, Sensei means teacher, is my Japanese language teacher, and he's a professor of Buddhist logic, Indian philosophy, Sanskrit, Pali, speaks English perfectly, has lived in India four years. And quite a liberated Japanese man, and we'd discuss things, you know, at length, and he'd say, well, I never thought of that, or I just can't feel that. I've never had that experience. You mean you think that way? And I'd say, well, I think that way. You mean you think that way? And we'd go back and forth. So what I'm going to try to do tonight is link three things on various levels. One is Buddhist practice, the other is the Japanese mind.

[04:19]

and the third is our own Western American social-cultural mind situation. And I'll be making assumptions too, of course, and I have some assumptions which... most of my assumptions are based on what I think... how I feel the mind works. And it seems to me there are two major possibilities – well, there may be many possibilities, but I know of two possibilities for experiencing things. I mean, if we assume there's a unity, then as soon as you think about something you have to separate and divide. And there are two ways that I know well to separate and divide and think about things, you know. And one is a Japanese way and one is a… Western way. And by Japanese I think that China, Korea, Vietnam and other oriental countries share a lot of fundamental assumptions about things. I know in Susan Sontag's recent book on North Vietnam and South Vietnam, Essays in a Book, she comes to many of the same conclusions that I do about some of the mind things that are happening.

[05:39]

Well, when you're looking for Buddhism in Japan, which is the title of the lecture, the first thing you find is the Japanese mind. And I'd say hundreds and hundreds, probably... I mean, I know of hundreds and hundreds, and many more than that, have gone to Japan to study Buddhism, and, I don't know, maybe ten or five or something like that number of persons have made some kind of success of it. is a profoundly ecological way of thinking about things. Every society has an approach, I think, and wants to answer the question, Who am I? And the question, who am I, has a two-fold implication. One is that if you ask the question, who am I, you're asking, in what way am I... should I be different or could I be better, or it implies some sense of being other than the way you are, you wouldn't ask the question, who am I? You'd say, geez, I'm me, you know. The other is, especially for Buddhism,

[07:07]

that you can't fully ask the question, who am I, unless you have what we call in Buddhism faith. But it isn't faith as we usually mean in the Christian sense. And so, in the Rinzai sect, for instance, the first koan given to people is, does a dog have a Buddha nature? and they answer Mu, which means sort of a kind of neutral no, I guess. It doesn't mean yes, it doesn't mean no, and it means, well, partly it's just a kind of mantra, Mu, like Om. But it also means, do you have Buddha nature? And so the first year or so, or more, is spent coming to a the answer to the question, does everything have Buddha nature? Do you have Buddha nature? Suzuki Roshi in his teaching, the koan he comes back to most, which he lectures about, is the story of... there's a student sitting and a teacher comes by and says, what are you doing? And he says, I'm practicing to become a Buddha. And so a little while later the student looks around and the teacher is

[08:31]

rubbing a tile, and the student says, what are you doing? And the teacher says, I'm trying to make this tile into a jewel, or a mirror. And that also has the implication of, there are many, but one is like, if you don't know you're already Buddha, and if you don't know you're already a jewel, how can you turn a tile into a jewel? So there's that level of faith. And the first Kensho, supposedly, as Rinzai emphasizes, a Kensho, which is a kind of Satori, a first Satori, is the mind and body, spiritual, whatever word you want to use to describe yourself, a full experience of this fundamental underlying wholeness. Well, so that's sort of the first step in practice. A second step in practicing Buddhism, or the first that these occur simultaneously, is freeing yourself from karma. And karma we mean generally hang-ups or something like that. But I think basically it means form, freeing yourself from forms. And for that we need way-seeking mind or a practice, but I'm not...

[10:05]

going to talk about practice directly. The idea of linking, and I said ecology, linking, I mean, if you say, Who am I? you're seeking some link with what you might be. Christian terms, I suppose that would be finding your identity with God or your connection to God. And in Freudian terms, perhaps it's finding your connection with your identity through parental images and your childhood, things like that. And in Jungian terms, I suppose it would be your identification in terms of collective unconscious. And in Buddhist terms – well, in Japanese terms, it would be your identification with the group or all Japanese people or something like that. a little too simple, but there's something, I think. Basically, it's true. In Buddhist terms, I think that it's finding your identification with all things. That you're not just with a group or with a collective unconscious, but every moment, the cosmos itself, it's hard to... I don't know cosmos, but it's kind of a big word, but something that means everything. You find your identification

[11:30]

is everything at once is identifying you. And that would be the same as to have a confidence in that truth would be a Kensho experience. I have a thing here called the Genjo Koan which is written by a section from Dogen Zenji's book. Bögen is one of the, I guess, two major Buddhist figures in Zen in Japan and one of the major figures in the history of Buddhism. And to give you an idea of this ecological kind of thinking... This is a very famous statement. To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to go beyond ourselves. To go beyond ourselves is to be enlightened, identified by all things. To be enlightened, identified by all things, is to free our body and mind and to free the bodies and minds of others. No trace of enlightenment remains and this no trace continues endlessly.

[12:47]

Here he's linking to study Buddhism, to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to go beyond ourself. To go beyond ourselves is to be enlightened and it can be translated also identified by all things. And to be enlightened by all things is to be free. And to free others. And no trace of this enlightenment remains and this no trace continues endlessly. aspect of it here is, he says, when a fish swims in the ocean, there is no end to the water, no matter how far it swims. When a bird flies in the sky, there is no end to the air, no matter how far it flies. However, the fish and the bird do not leave their elements, the air and the water. When the use is large, it is used largely. When the use is small, it is used in a small way. Though it flies everywhere, if the bird leaves the air, it will die at once. Water makes life and air makes life. The bird makes life and the fish makes life. Life makes the bird and life makes the fish." Now, he's using this as analogies for practice, enlightenment, everything.

[14:12]

This is just very simple and fundamental, I think, ecological thinking, which is what we better have more of or we're not going to have an environment left, which is water makes life and air makes life. The bird makes life and the fish makes life. Life makes the bird and life makes the fish. Total interpenetration of identity or reality. In the most... if you wanted to have one statement which explained all of Buddhist philosophy, you'd say, everything changes. And when you see that everything changes, you see that everything is in interrelationship and interdependency. And again, here he says... And this refers to zazen, or still meditation. If we watch the shore from a boat, it seems that the shore is moving. But when we watch the boat directly, we know that it is the boat that moves. In other words, when you watch yourself in meditation directly, you find it's yourself that moves.

[15:37]

If we examine all things with a confused body and mind, we will suppose that our self is permanent. But if we practice closely and return to our present place, it will be clear that nothing at all is permanent. So, this kind of thinking, emphasizes interrelationships, or we can even say a field, and there's lots of connections with Einsteinian kind of physics, etc. Milarepa, who's a famous Tibetan yogi, says at some point that he practices a space-like meditation, and in Buddhism you often have reference to space consciousness. And this is a Another way of saying the same practice in which, because you see, if you give up identifying yourself by who you were and who you're going to be, and you identify yourself moment after moment, you're talking about space, not time. But actually, space and time are just abstractions, you know, and actually you're creating space-time each moment.

[16:58]

The universe is an infinite number of centers of which each of you is one, and you're creating the universe each moment. As Dogen says, the bird makes life, water makes life. Each is creating the universe each moment. So the question, who am I, is not a question of you alone, but of your relationships with things. And karma, as I mentioned, is to be caught by form. Or not just to be caught, but perhaps form itself. And so the first practice in Buddhism is also how to begin to free yourself from karma, or free yourself from... The first step is to stop creating karma. Because as long as you're creating it, then you're really, you know, like you can't even ever start to get free from it, because you're producing it faster usually, or at least at the same rate at which you're... So, if you can stop creating karma, then you can begin to... And that means as simple as don't take pencils from work. Don't treat people in a negative... And a practice in a monastery involves just simple things like how you hang up your clothes and things like that.

[18:21]

Because that's the most immediate level at which you can reach the problem of creating karma. So, if you stop creating karma and then you want to be free from karma, that's an attachment sometimes it's called. In a simple sense people think, well, attachment to status or having money or success or sex or something like that. But actually I think a more basic attachment is the way we... an immediate level respond to things. Behind our thinking there are certain assumptions about what time and space are, and what past, present, and future is, and what inside and out are, what consciousness, unconsciousness, up, down, etc. And most of us just think, well, there's up and there's down, and there's, of course, there's inside and there's outside. But actually those distinctions don't really exist.

[19:35]

And one thing you find when you go to Japan is that they have very different distinctions of what inside and outside is, what up and down are, and time and space. Quite different ways of thinking about things, which it's so basic that they end up having a different kind of mind, a different kind of being. Of course, in some sense, it's just a matter of emphasis. They're still human beings and like us, but the way they put things together, the way they're the information comes from the environment and is organized in their own being is rather different from the way we organize our experiences and our sense information. So the question And a more basic level, again, of how you free yourself from karma is how you free yourself from your own society. How is your society catching you? How is your language catching you? Because these things are built right into your language. Chomsky, who's a linguist, says that if you study language you study the mind, and if

[20:52]

Japanese language, you find you're studying a different kind of mind. Of course, that suggests something else, that, you know, that mind is something bigger than this or that particular form. Much of what most people call psychology, I think, is a kind of sociology. And so you have a kind of personal sociology and psychology and there's a social sociology and psychology and actually they are versions of each other in many ways. And when an individual is trying to break through or I have some... I don't like words like breakthrough because they imply that they're dualistic, but anyway, it's too hard to speak non-dualistically and particularly in English. I think Japan... Japanese languages and Chinese... Japanese and Chinese have over...

[22:12]

1500 years or so, developed ways of speaking and expressing non-dualistic ideas, ideas which suggest the wholeness of things. Black is a black butterfly wing or a knight or a shadow or something like that, not just an abstraction, black. And words, concepts which suggest interrelationships make non-dualistic expression easier than words which emphasize distinction. So, when an individual is attempting to break through, say, to a deeper level, to a big mind or something like that, in a traditional society he's primarily trying to find his own way. But when a society is in transition, and one assumption I make is that the West, I guess maybe the world, is in a transition now, which is, to my knowledge of Western history, the biggest transition since the Homeric Plato transition. Anyway, we're going through some kind of big transition, I think a fundamental change in consciousness and the way we think about things.

[23:39]

So that when a society is in transition, what's happening in society is trying to manifest itself in the individual, and what's happening in the individual is a way of changing society. So that it's a much more complex situation, in which at Zen Center, for instance, when we're trying to find a way to practice, we're trying to find a way to live at a very fundamental level. And we're trying to find answers, I think, to questions which there are no answers at present. I think the negro, the black in our society, for instance, finds that the public... You know, like our government says, okay, our society says, well, everybody equally shares the public. and has won vote, etc. And this isn't, without other areas of significant activity and expression, it doesn't mean anything. He's completely short-changed. And what is happening, I think, with the Civil Rights Movement is

[25:00]

in basic ways, challenges the idea of the public and the way our society, our government, tries to govern. I'll make this kind of idea a little clearer, maybe. In the younger generation or younger people in our society, I think they're, for instance, the people's park. This is an attempt I mean, the idea of property is going through a change. I know I was coming across on a ship, for instance, and there was a big discussion on the ship among the passengers, and the passengers agreed that anybody who challenged public property or private property should be killed. And, you know, I said, you know, isn't human life more... They said, a person who doesn't know what property is, isn't really a human being. You know? So I had a little trouble with that. I spent most of the time in my room. I think there's, perhaps in this challenge to property, there's something fundamental that we can go back to. I know there's a marvelous book called Never Cry Wolf.

[26:28]

And I don't know if some of you read it, perhaps, by Farley Moffat, something like that. And the guy in it is – and I'm going to talk about territories, another possibility rather than property – he's dropped by parachute into northern Canada to study the timber wolves, which the Canadian government, if I remember correctly, thinks are decimating the herds. And of course, I think most it's white men from airplanes shooting them, because the timberwolves are smart enough to only kill the old and the weak and preserve the herd, since hunting and fishing peoples and animals have an astute ecological sense. Anyway, he's dropped down by parachute with all his supplies and he lands in a place which is right where the timberwolves, sort of a timberwolf headquarters is right near, and it's right where they come by to go on hunting parties. And he's rather A little bit scared, I think. And he sets up his tent and everything, but it's also a good place to observe. And the timber wolves come right by his tent, you see. So he remembers that wolves and coyotes and many animals pee in a circle to define their territory. So he goes out of his tent, you know, and he pees in a great big circle.

[27:58]

So the head timberwolf, who he named King George, comes out of his cave. He's coming. He's on a four-day hunting trip. He's on his way back. And as he's sort of loping along, you know, he comes along and he stops right there, you know. And he looks over at the tent, at this guy, and the guy looks at him, and this went on for a few minutes, and they looked at each other, and then King George proceeded to pee all the way around the outside edge of this guy. So, whenever King George returned from his hunting party, they'd come loping along, and they'd get right to that, and they'd go, do-do-do-do, out around and on, you know. There may be something fundamental in very primitive behavior, which is maybe very sophisticated behavior, in which we can – Gary Snyder feels strongly about this – if you look at the primitive you see fundamental ways of organization which, when they get structured and structured and structured in the society through various advantages, that way they get out of shape. And anyway, this seems that the sense of territory may be fundamental but the sense of property may not be.

[29:12]

This kind of idea, this struggle for definitions. I think it's interrelated at all levels. I think the whole problem of socialism, communism, capitalism is the same problem, that we don't yet know what our relationship to the material world is in terms of property and possessions and the moral effect of money on us, that kind of thing. And I think the attempt, the big push now seems to be at present into a kind of ecological awareness. And it looks like if we don't solve the problem soon our environment will be gone in many ways. The nitrogen chain and all that information which you must have, or you should have, and the population which some people say by 1975 South America, China, India will be

[30:33]

you know, in mass starvation in Japan, for instance, which imports 50% of its food, will not be able to import its 50%. And we, as far as I can see, have five or six years left to, or less, to solve our problems, both ecologically and demographically, population, pollution, etc. So I think what I sense now in myself and in America and I wish more in Japan, is a struggle with what the forms might be. I think our society is like pushing each of us to try to find out what these forms might be. And this is Buddhist practice or whatever, you know. This is again just my own feeling about things. I feel that we're pushing ourselves not just off our planet by too many people, but we're pushing ourselves out of our mind. And by that I mean I feel that each person in our earth is a kind of positive or negative charge and we each are

[32:02]

contain that positive or negative charge. And culture or media, and by media I mean our nervous system and books and television and electronic media, all are attempting to discharge and recharge. And when the population gets bigger than the media can discharge and recharge, people start going out of their minds, not just finding no geographical space. Cage, you know, says here – this is the Zen Center brochure which was done a couple of years ago – but in it there's a quotation from Cage where he says, one evening after dinner I was telling friends that I was now concerned with improving the world. One of them said, I thought you always were. I then explained that I believe and am acting upon Marshall McLuhan's statement that we have, through electric technology, produced an extension of our brains to the world formerly outside of us. To me that means the disciplines gradual and sudden, principally oriental, formerly practiced by individuals to pacify their minds, bringing them into accord with ultimate reality. They must now be practiced socially, that is, not just inside our heads.

[33:28]

but outside of them, in the world where our central nervous system effectively now is. This is the kind of assumption I'm making, which I feel is true. Like, Gary Snyder, who's been attempting recently to, the last year since he's been back from Japan, to bring more ecological awareness into our society, feels that the population should be reduced, actually. I'm not sure it should be reduced. I think if we could stop getting any bigger and concentrate on making better schools rather than more schools, we'd be a lot better off. But he feels, and many people feel, that the wild areas of our society should not be settled further. And I think that there is a profound relationship between geography and spirit.

[34:54]

And just as if you close off the actual geographical wild areas, I feel you close off your own wild areas. And we need wild areas or meditation or vision to get beyond the vocabularies which we'll always have of this society or that society. And in Buddhism when they say, you know, when you start your practice a mountain is a mountain and after you practice for a while, a mountain is not a mountain, and then when your practice is deep, a mountain is a mountain again. Generally that's taken to be symbolical of practice, but I think it also means an actual mountain. And when Dogen says, the colour of mountains is Buddha's pure body, the sound of running water is his great speech. I think that means actually, not just symbolically, actually water and mountains. So I think that when I'm talking about this interdependency in ecology, I'm talking about geography and society and culture and economics.

[36:17]

As we know, any religious discipline has ideas about poverty or how you should live in relation to money, and these kinds of assumptions about things are fundamental and their interrelationships are changing. So, when we're studying the Orient and the great interest in the Orient that's been growing for a couple centuries at least, is But from one point of view, we're looking for more forms to charge and discharge. And so, in Japan, it looks like you find many things similar to what I'm talking about. They have a much more ecological sense of things, but it stops. they stop with group ego, you know, rather than individual ego, and everything outside the group, you know, cats and lots of things, sort of fall into an area that they don't have feeling for. And when I first went to Japan I thought, well, you know, like, sort of fundamental part of my own practice had been this awareness of the interrelationships of things, and

[37:45]

I got to Japan and I thought, oh my God, I've been trying to be Japanese all this time, because the Japanese have this sense, you know, and it took me several months to start to realize that there was something else happening, which it makes Japanese culture look very much like Buddhism, but it's quite different. The first thing I had to do when I tried to practice Buddhism and study Japanese culture, etc., in Japan, was try to distinguish between what's Buddhism and what's Japanese culture. And I got down to the basic assumptions about the way things work, was that every time I tried to dig at it, I got always down to there. Most of the people practicing Buddhism in Japan, I think, mix up and may even mainly be practicing to be Japanese people. Each society, of course, has an ideal cultural type, we have an ideal type Western human being.

[39:07]

If you followed everything that was good in our society and never did what our society says is bad, you'd end up to be this ideal type person. And in Japan they have such a person. He's the archer and the swordsman and the tea master. They're quite different from what a Zen master is. But for the most part, Japanese themselves confuse the tea master and the sword master, etc., with what a Zen master is. and the Americans particularly, because to survive in the monasteries and survive in practicing Buddhism there, you have to learn how to function as a Japanese or you're treated... I mean, it just doesn't work. Now let me... I'll try to give you some examples now of this field or different way of talking about things. I guess it would be better if I put it on the chair. When we make the letter A, for instance, we lean something that way.

[40:38]

And then we lean something this way, and then we put a prop in between. And you can actually make a house that way, you can make an A-frame house. And almost, I think, all Western, all our numbers and our letters can be actually constructed from pieces of wood. You can make them, you know, they're physical objects. But you can't make this out of a piece of wood. You just can't do it, right? And when Americans first are taught this thing, which is part of the syllabary it's called, it's na. When they're first taught na, they draw it this way, because they're trying to make an object. And it takes a little time. I mean, it doesn't feel right, you know, like it feels like this is floating, you know. There's another one, P, which goes like this. Which, this is in... Actually, there's a line there, but it's implied. And the Japanese don't have any problem with the fact that it's implied. It's just... If we leave spaces, like you take a B and you draw it like that, you end up with 13. You know? It's not... If there's nothing there, there's nothing there for us. But you see,

[42:09]

We tend to put these things together on the blackboard or on the piece of paper. They conform to an idea we have. And for the Japanese, as you see here, it's in what you might call gesture. And if we, you know, I can make an A in some such position as this, and it can come out pretty good. Pretty hard to make a knot in that position. Not bad. And in Japan, you're taught, much more than we are here in writing classes, that you have to sit a certain way. Your back has to be straight, and your hand has to be right, and the page has to be right, and then... And what they... When we look at an A, we just say, well, that looks like a good A. But when they look at a character, or kanji, or one of these syllabary, made by a person, what they see is the state of being of the person who made it. So, for them, this is organized, not on here. It's organized in the individual who made it. Do you see what I'm talking about? The Japanese and Chinese

[43:38]

have going here is they have a sense of area out of which this is manifested. There's a kind of sense of an area which links these things. You can see that as soon as we're talking about this like this, we're talking about and maybe feelings more than intellect, because you have a field for the way it goes together, not just an idea. And this kind of putting things together by an area or a field pervades the culture. My wife and I went to a school thing that the we were invited to go to. It was a kind of field day for all the kids. And it was one of the most unusual events we attended in Japan. There was so much going on, we couldn't figure out what was going on most of the time. There were races starting every few seconds, literally.

[45:03]

And there was one game that particularly illustrates the atmosphere of the whole playground, which is some kids held a bamboo pole, right, and on the top of the bamboo pole was a basket. And the kids were, it looked to me, they were supposed to take these red balls. And white balls. And the kids all wear red hats and white hats. And some boys have red hats and some girls have red hats and some boys have white hats and some girls... So they're divided into sort of teams. And there's red balls and white balls. And it looks like you're supposed to pick up the ball and throw it into the basket, right? And to us, our games are organized in such a way that, like, there's some point and there's some, you know, like, specific thing, like basketballs. But in this game, There was no point except creating an environment. And these kids, there were hundreds of balls and hundreds of kids and they were just screaming and throwing balls. And red hats and white hats and red balls are bouncing and the balls are bouncing back on their heads. And they all missed the basket. No one looked. No one aimed. It was just, they just kept picking up every one they could and threw it. Just like that. And they were bouncing on everybody's head and everyone was screaming. And it was wonderful, you know.

[46:19]

if you tried to think of it as a game in which they're throwing specific, you know, things with skill up to there, but as soon as you saw it as they were creating an environment of balls, red and white balls and red and white hats falling and screaming and whistles, well, it made great sense and it was fun, you know, and the whole field day was like that, this kind of thing. The driving is this way, the driving is this way. It's true. It's perilous. They have no sidewalks, which we'll make reference to why that is later, or imply it. And until you get on to the fact that they organize their driving spatially or in a field, you're scared to death all the time because the car is like that. There'll be, like, say there's three lanes, right, going one direction. There'll be six cars in three lanes, side by side. And no one pays any attention to the lines. They just, I mean, it's like that all the time. But as soon as you sense that they've taken Western ideas of traffic and painted some white lines down, but it doesn't mean anything to them, you know.

[47:28]

So they just drive and everybody dodges and the cars miss each other by just real teeny amounts. It's scary. When you have to return to social level, when you have this kind of interdependency, your I-ness is related to the group, not to something that you are intrinsically. And I think one of the basic assumptions Japanese people make, which is different from us, well, we, I think, tend to make an assumption, psychiatrists have this, people talking about this a lot to them, I'm unique or separate or different. And a lot of social conversation at parties and things like that is you're trying to tell the other person that you're not so different and you're trying to find out that they're not so different, that's first stage. In the second stage you're trying to show them how different and unique you are. But in Japan they seem, as far as I can tell in talking with people, they seem to make a basic assumption that I'm the same as you are. We're the same. So they don't have to talk about all that. So they talk about the weather or something like that, you know, and a lot of the times they don't talk about anything. And I know a lot of Caucasians who've gone to Japan and studied the language and

[48:49]

tried to become friends with the Japanese and then they keep saying, they don't say anything, they don't like me, but the Japanese people often just sit together and sort of groove. And I feel that they have a feeling of closeness which we perhaps get in an encounter group, get close to. And if you really feel that closeness, which I sense they feel, I think it's a kind of satori experience. But I think if they could know what we mean by being individuated, it would be a kind of satori experience for them. From my point of view, often the Japanese person seems very hollow and empty, not there in some intrinsic sense, because his identity is always diluted out through the group. But in some other sense, he seems much deeper and more refined or something than we are. The connection to this field and feeling, because I think that the Japanese person tends, again, when you have this field thing, another ramification of it, is that you tend to organize your experience from feeling rather than through concepts. So the houses, for instance, have a sense of visual feeling rather than visual ideas.

[50:24]

And if you go to Japanese houses and temples and with the idea that it's going to look like the postcards and look like our idea of what houses are, it just doesn't, it doesn't hold together. They're really creating a kind of environment of light and a space which you feel as you walk across, you know. There's a kind of, my arms can reach to there. And they drive by feeling too. In addition to this space organization, they, again, my experience of it is they drive by feeling. and I came to this conclusion very clearly one day I took a taxi cab in Tokyo and something about the way the man drove seemed different to me and I felt for one thing safe and I watched him drive and I couldn't quite figure out what it was and it particularly struck me we came up to an intersection and we stopped and there's traffic going and I looked and I got this sense that he was looking to the right and to the left and forming a conclusion, an idea, concept. It's clear to the left and it's clear to the right and now I'll drive out. Well, Japanese people don't do that. They sort of drive up and they feel like going. And so they drive out. And they may feel like going because there's nobody, no traffic in the way. But they may feel like going because

[51:50]

they feel and then everybody feels like getting out of the way. So it works out all right and this even involves you know car insurance somebody gave us a car so I had to get it insured and the man said you have to be very careful he said if you are going through a green light driving through a green light and somebody comes from the other direction through a red light drunk speeding and hits you smack in the side you're going to be partly at fault for not getting out of the way. And maybe ten percent, you know. And insurance claims are based on this. If there's an accident They measure all the tire stuff in an unusual way, but they also ask you, how were you feeling, what was your mood, where were you going, what were you planning to do, and what side of the bed did you get out of, etc. And then they put all of this information together and they decide 40% and 60%.

[52:52]

Well, this taxi driver, I always like to test my guesses about these things, and I began a conversation with this taxi driver who seemed to drive by concepts, you know, like it's clear, rather than just a feeling, he wanted to drive out there. And I said, have you ever lived in America, or, you know, etc.? And, my, as much Japanese as I could, he didn't know any English, practically, except a few words. And he said no, but his father had been brought up in America and had been an American college and had returned to Japan just before he was born, and he was brought up in Japan, but by a father who was completely Americanized. So, I would guess that his father gave him this sense of conceptual thinking. It doesn't mean that because the Japanese organize, I feel, their feelings, their perceptions and sense information through feeling, that they don't have intellectual ideas about things. But they intellectually, mentally perceive things, but it's organized through feeling.

[54:08]

There are two verbs which cause a lot of problems in Japan. One is iku and one is kuru. One is to go and one is to come. And we have a lot of trouble figuring out how they use them and they have a lot of trouble figuring out how we use go and come. And two phases of it that I went over with my Japanese teacher at length, this professor of Buddhist logic, and we kept figuring. It took us three or four days to come to this obvious conclusion. One is that we tend to say, so-and-so has gone on an errand. They say, his errand didn't come back, or his errand didn't coming back. As somebody pointed out the other day, they were talking to one of the Japanese priests, priest's wife, and they said to him, I don't know which one it was, he's gone east. And she immediately said, he's coming back. Immediately she had to give that reference. And what I found is you can make sense of it if you think of it in terms of we say the individual has gone out and is doing something. They say there's a person out there and he's coming back to the group. And the reference is always to the group. He's out there in relation to the group and he's coming back. And we say he's just out there, you know, he knows what he's going to do. And that's his problem.

[55:37]

Another aspect of the iku kuru thing is we say, tomorrow please come to Macy's at three o'clock. There's a big department store in Japan called Daimaru. And my teacher said, you can't say that. You can't say, come to Macy's tomorrow at three o'clock. You have to say, please go to Macy's tomorrow at three o'clock. Well, we went over and over that. Why couldn't you say, please come to Macy's tomorrow? Well, finally, what we figured out together, Nagasaki Sensei and I, is that the Western people have three stages which they imagine that exist – past, present and future. And when we say, please come to Macy's tomorrow, we're imagining we're in that future stage at Macy's, at two o'clock, saying, please come to Macy's where I will be at two o'clock, or three o'clock. don't and can't do that. They can't make that imagination, that there's this future stage which they can put themselves into. Now, I don't know for sure, but I would bet there's no science fiction of, you know, time machines and things like that in Japan, because I don't think they would have the idea that you could get into a machine and go into a future stage. Now, when you look at the language, you find that they don't have past, present and future tenses. They have a two – we call them tenses, they're not really tenses even.

[57:07]

They refer not to time, but to activity. An activity which is completed roughly corresponds to our past. An activity which is going on roughly corresponds to our present and future. So the future is always an extension from what's going on at present. Well, this brings you to an immediate conclusion, which is that what do they do about something new? You know, like what about something new? it's very difficult for them to imagine something new. They think of improving and bettering and things like that, but something new isn't a positive idea. I mean, the idea of progress and newness and things like that, which is so important to us, is not to them. In fact, you find this kind of ramification throughout their society, which is, you know, like in Confucian, the whole Confucian idea in China and in Japan, the Confucianism and the ancestor worship and Shinto gods being the original mommy and daddy of the best families and things like that. All goes to reinforce an idea that the ideal is in the future. I mean, it's in the past. Not ideal is heaven or progress, but the ideal time was in the past. And I got the impression that, well, if you imagined our culture as a sort of car,

[58:33]

driving along. Look, we're looking at the windshield with our headlights, you know, sort of telling us where to go, with a little rear-view mirror, you know, which the historians work on, you know, like what's going on in the past. The Japanese are driving along the highway with an enormous rear-view mirror, you know, and a very little windshield around the corner. But mostly they're looking in the rear-view mirror. And this has a lot to do with their copying which we call copying, you know, but to them they just don't see why this copying disturbs us so fundamentally. Like, we copy Swiss chocolate, you know, and we change the formula a little, probably, and change the label and say, New England's oldest Swiss chocolate. It looks different. In Japan, they'll take something like Tobler's, which is a famous Swiss chocolate, and they copy it exactly. I don't know what they call it in Japan, I forget, but it could be Nobler's. For instance, they've copied a cream, right? And they call it, unknowingly, creep. They put cream and cream together and come up with creep. Well, they've copied the Swiss chocolate so exactly that, I mean, when you buy it, you just don't know. You have to look very closely to see there's a little Japanese writing on it.

[59:56]

which Tobler's itself might have, but the raised letters are the same. They're red with a little gold around them, and it's exactly the same. You know, you have to really look closely to realize it's Japanese. And when you go in the streets, every car looks like a French car, an English car, an American car. When you hear it go to the go-go places and you hear the rock and roll, the group, the first song is BB King. The second song is Little Richard. The third song is The Beatles. The fourth song is The Jefferson Airplane. They imitate fantastically. It really sounds like B.B. King. This guy's singing with a voice. And you look at this little Japanese man. How's he doing it? And then suddenly he's Paul McCartney the next minute. And if you say like a good rock and roll group in America would only play its own material. You know, a rock and roll group would just play everybody else's material. It just plays at parties or something. They just don't understand that. And perhaps, if they keep playing this kind of rock and roll like this, they'll develop a really great rock and roll, you know, very refined and deeper, you know. But this has a lot to do with Buddhist tradition, too, when they tell you how to practice. I mean, for instance, a friend of mine, Michael Kors, a woodblock print artist,

[61:19]

And he was told by his teacher to make these woodblock prints in cherry wood of this little thing. And he carved them exactly, but he didn't carve the mistakes and the worn out parts. And his teacher said, you have to do it all over again. You have to copy the worn out parts too. Exactly. So it looks as worn out. I said, you're going to, this is a way of wearing out the tradition. But no, you copy exactly. And of course, the same day he told me that, I happened to be looking through a book of Rodin. And Rodin says copying is fundamentally opposed to art, true art. But to Japan, fundamentally I found other statements where they say self-sacrifice and complete copying and renewing is the only spring of creativity. So that's quite different. I mean, for instance, here's one more example in this line. I met a man on the ship who was a Westinghouse engineer who was building an atomic reactor in Japan. It's the reactor we saw up there by Tsuruga.

[62:34]

When he got there, he was doing a very fundamental part in the basic part in the bottom, which had to do with the reactor sitting on top of it somehow. And as he opened his toolbox, he's a tool expert, every time he took a tool out, there were three men assigned to him. Two engineers, three engineers, one with an explanation, one with a camera, and one with pencil. And every tool he took out was immediately photographed, drawn, and detailed, and analyzed. And he, you know, like he didn't want to open up his tool bag. As soon as he opened up and put it down to do something, they photographed it and blew it. But they didn't understand why it was bothering him, you know. Like, what are you trying to hide your tools from us for? But they don't have this idea that a patent, they have a lot of patent attorneys who try to keep the rest of the world happy. They don't have this idea that that belongs to a particular company or a particular man. These things are created by society, just like our language. You didn't create language yourself, it was given to you, in a way, by your society. And they feel that way about tools and everything else. And, of course, now they're building a reactor in Iran, following the Westinghouse technique, and doing it somewhat cheaper than Westinghouse can do it.

[63:59]

About the houses, let me tell you, I'm going to talk about inside, outside. But I can remember, I don't know if I can convey to you what I mean by this experience of mine, but I'll try. I was walking along some years ago, I was working in a warehouse and I just barely started studying Zen. Though I'm not sure I had yet even, but anyway I was already reading Buddhism and I hadn't started practicing. I was coming back and I had either a cigarette wrapper or a candy wrapper or something and I was going over some railroad tracks near the warehouse and I just threw it down. And I walked a couple steps and I had a kind of flash, a kind of funny feeling, you know. And on the first level it was, you know, I threw that down there and it's not going to be cleaned up. I had to throw it down on the floor of the warehouse where it'll be cleaned up, you know. Because there, just sit there, you know. And I realized that the problem was that there's an idea of outside where you're free and inside where you behave one way, and outside where you... And I had this flash of there's no such thing as inside-outside. And it was quite a big experience for me, that there's no inside-outside, there's no nature and unnatural, you know, natural-unnatural.

[65:21]

Anyway, I can't convey what it is to break through some distinction like that, that you have an idea that's inside and outside, but it was, for me, quite an important experience. Well, in Japan, what I found is that the inside-outside thing is... I mean, it doesn't really exist in any terms that we're used to. Japanese... American architects who copy Japanese houses generally, and get ideas from Japan on how houses here can be designed, generally think that the Japanese house is open to the outside. That's one thing they do. They also make a distinction. They still keep a distinction between inside and outside, so that usually there's glass sliding doors or something, but a pretty strong, that's outside with the plants and this is inside, and though it can open up, it's still inside and outside. Well, in Japan, that distinction isn't so clear. It's very hard to tell in a Japanese house where inside leaves off and outside begins. And also, if you're going to use that kind of inside-outside, it's perhaps more accurate to say the Japanese doesn't open the inside out, he brings the outside in. And so you go out in the garden, for instance, and the garden, which you don't usually go out into because it's just for being inside-looking,

[66:46]

It's a completely shaped inside kind of feeling. The trees are twisted and the growth is controlled. Every plant is planted so that it flowers at a different time of year. And it might be more intrinsic for a Japanese person to say, it flowers at a different type of year than at a different time of year. Let me go to the blackboard now. I want to leave time for you to ask questions, so I'm going to try not to talk too much. You don't ever find, in Japan, this kind of space. Almost never, except in Tokyo now. Building, sidewalk, street.

[67:49]

You don't find this type of space. Square kind of space, you know, but there's a real distinction between this and this. Even on the street, when you're walking down the street, the buildings look … the space on a street or in a traditional … the buildings not only are back and forth, but there's a tendency for So that the space is much more, you can't say that's, you know, that shape, right? And, of course, in between here, there's space. These are little, when I first was thinking about that, these were little drawings on either, even you go back to Greek times and our Greek temples, the top, you know, the little part like that in the column,

[68:59]

This is really a flat surface. I mean, it looks like that, and there's a column. But the amount of sticks out is very small. You know. Okay. This is a kind of making an A, even like when we, when the Christian way of praying is to lock your fingers together. Like, we make an object, an A. The Japanese way, the Chinese way is this way, just two hands. That kind of thing relates. It's like the other thing which Alan Watts pointed out once. The Japanese, we count, one, two, three, four, five. We throw out five things. Say, there's five things. And the Japanese count, one, two, three, four, five. And they disappear. That's where they go. But they're in here. And that kind of thing is even carried out in the tools. For instance, most of Japanese carpentry tools and garden tools are pull tools. You pull toward yourself, you plane toward yourself. And we always plane away. In a western house, that's your little bungalow here, and you've got a yard around it, right? And you might want to put a wall around your house, right?

[70:26]

Well, generally, most cities that I know anything about say that the wall of your house has to be, you know, can't be higher than four feet or something. Usually, you must be able to see over it, which suggests that the public, the government, public, etc., feels that it has a right to control your space up to there. Right? There's laws. Inside there, you can do what you want. You can take your clothes off. talk, use dirty words, anything you want, you can do. That's your private area. And this is sort of private and this is sort of public. Oh, your windows and stuff. In a Japanese house, well, it's hard to just draw it like that, it doesn't look quite like that. One is, first there's your room, right? Say that, I'll just draw, well, this is, Like in our house, we have two, there's more rooms, but there's a room there and a little genkan and a kitchen and things. But all of these open up. There's storage here. But these two rooms, for instance, that's the tatamis, and then there's a platform, and there are many houses on another level. And these are sliding. Of course, the Japanese house doesn't seal the outside off, it just is a kind of buffer. You know, it's a little warmer inside, but not much.

[71:52]

and a little cooler in the summer because you have a breeze going through. But you can't really alter the weather completely. It's a variation on the weather. They don't have this idea that inside should be different from the outside. I think they feel uncomfortable in general, and you do in Japan, which you're used to a house which It seems right that it's cold outside. It should be cold inside. It just comes to feel right. It just seems strange to overheat your house. If you just take the edge off it, and the hibachi, essentially, which they heated with for the most part, just warms your fingers long enough so that you can write or something. It doesn't throw much heat in the room at all. Well, you have these levels, and then you have your garden, right? And you have a wall, and your wall can be as high as you want. Often Japanese people spend as much on the garden as on the house, and as much on the wall as they do on the garden. But there isn't here a sense of private in here. In fact, if you go to various American houses, Western houses, you get inside, and each one's got his own thing going, some variation painting. You go into a Japanese house, and right down to the middle, the culture is.

[73:08]

Every garden is the same, every interior is the same. A very few variations. Essentially, the culture goes right to the center of the house. Now, this personal, impersonal, private change I want to talk about is, again, has implications throughout the culture, which is... For example, someone pointed out recently, I think a San Francisco psychologist, that... I think the article where I read it was in Time magazine, where he showed that violent people, people with a tendency toward violence, tense up when they pass what I call an airlock, a kind of buffer zone, you approach them beyond that point and they begin to tense up. Their hands and neck muscles and emotionally, psychologically begin to tense up. And the normal person, a normal Western person, you get up into about here and he begins to tense up. But Japanese people don't have those areas. In fact, one of the things which is

[74:34]

has been a little startling to me sometimes, as I say, sometimes I don't think of myself as a priest, but in Japan I do wear robes sometimes when I'm in a situation where Buddhist robes are required. And I'll be walking along and some Japanese man, a priest, who I may not even know, comes up to me and says, you should change that and do that. I feel, you know, really sort of like, what are you doing, you know? In fact, I've given that example to people. I've sort of reached over some Westerner and said, I just don't know, let me start, I'm going to, and they immediately feel uncomfortable if I grab their clothes. But in Japan, they don't think anything of it. And you get on buses and people sleep on each other. In fact, there's a great deal of Well, having read Henry Miller, I thought it was like New York subway sex. But it doesn't seem to be. It seems to be, but you know, maybe your genitals feel a little better against somebody than some other part of your body, so you might as well.

[75:47]

But there isn't a sense of it being sexual or like you're coming on or something like that. You know, the people look you right in the eye and stand there against you, you know. Particularly if I was wearing robes, it happened. And at first I thought, well, Henry Miller, you know this, you'd really have a field day here in Japan. But it just doesn't seem to be. It's just, you know, we're all crowded together here, you know. And there's a lot of overlap permitted, just as in the driving, everybody ducks. There's an enormous amount of overlap and forgiveness. Another kind of example is my wife and daughter made the mistake of going to the movies on a Sunday. Sunday's really the only day off. And they sell as many tickets as people want. You know, there may be, say, 200 seats and they sell 800 tickets, you know. Maybe that's based on the fact that at one time there were no seats, just tummies, you know, everybody could squeeze in. But it gets very crowded. And she watched, and three seats appeared, you know, in an aisle with, say, maybe 15 seats to the left and six or seven seats to the right of it. And in America, if you were in such a place, and you were walking down the aisle, and you saw three seats over there, and you had 15 seats between you, and there was a guy right at the other end of the aisle, and he had only six seats to it, you'd say, well, he got that one, and you'd look around. Not in Japan. They both raced from each end with their umbrellas out.

[77:14]

And, you know, like all over everybody and they got to the post. And, you know, if I did that in America, I'd expect to get punched, you know, like if you race somebody for a seat in a movie theater. I mean, I'd be a little scared that I'd get hit, you know. But in Japan, they grabbed the seats and then one of them got it first and then they began to help each other getting other seats. They immediately started cooperating. And you find this on the buses too, they stand in line. The general explanation in the sociological literature in Japan is that Japanese haven't learned how to behave in public yet, in the modern western kind of public, like subway stations. But I don't think that's what's going on at all. I think that they stand in line and the bus comes and they get on and then everybody's happy, you know. Only little boys come first and they grab the best seats and women get the least good and somewhere in between other people. It's status which determines things rather. Anyway, there's this kind of overlap

[78:29]

But in this public-private kind of distinction which I'm talking about, I think we can carry it a step further, which is, I think Western people have a tendency to have, they have a sort of unconscious, right? We think they have an unconscious. And the conscious is some, you know, controlled version of the unconscious and a little bit of information is let in and some is repressed and suppressed. There's a kind of barrier there. Of course, in Zen meditation that barrier is changed. But there's a kind of tension between unconscious and conscious, and then there's a relationship between conscious and private. Like, your private and public behavior are both functions of your conscious, though your private behavior may be a function of your unconscious too. Of course, overtly, but there may be other ways. Of course, unconscious behavior, I prefer under-life and over-life, but your under-life may influence, of course, your whole life – conscious, public, But there is this kind of matching. We have an idea of private and public and conscious, and we try to match, as we do past, present and future, this matching game of ideas. And I think, for instance, most people are trying to behave and make their private life shape up to public ideals. And the artist, perhaps, is trying to make the public shape up to his private ideals.

[79:55]

And there's a kind of tension there of the artist in the Western society who tries to say, I've received something and maybe society should change or recognize my contribution. But there's this back and forth between the public, private, et cetera. In Japan, as far as I can see, this doesn't exist. I find that a lot of what we consider unconscious is part of the culture. And what's conscious for them is somewhat different than our idea of conscious, and they don't have this tension between their private life and public life. The culture just takes care of everything. And their houses, they behave pretty much not so differently from they do in other situations, and their houses are designed and look pretty much as the public does. The culture influences everything. In our society, when you go out in public, the individuality is reinforced. In Japan, when you go out in public, there's no... Just as we possess that little area, this is our private area, and out there everybody shares. I mean, like, that's public, and everyone has an equal right to it, and you can base a government on it, and everybody votes about it, and there are laws made about that area, beyond your buffer zone and beyond your house.

[81:17]

In Japan, they don't have that idea of public and streets and the relationship of the individual with the government are all influenced by that. I think it's too… take too long to go into that in more detail. But the way in which identity is reinforced in our society at fundamental levels and the way in which group ego is reinforced at fundamental levels in their society is extremely interesting. I'll give you one example that's interesting of group dynamics. There was a story in a newspaper about a boy who drowned. There were 75 children in an Osaka pool, and I know those pools, the water's pretty murky and they're teeny, they're school pools. If I read such a story in America, I would say, well, 75 kids in a pool, two supervisors, geez, you know, like they probably should have four or five supervisors and maybe only 30 kids in the pool. Because when all the kids got out of the pool, there was a kid drowned at the bottom, right? But in Japan, the story ended with the reason this boy drowned is because he didn't do his tune-up exercises before.

[82:35]

And you see this carried out throughout the society that if something happens, the individual is blamed and not the group. And we tend to, if something happens to an individual, we tend to blame the group. There should be more supervisors or less kids in the pool or something like that. An example of this was, which even the scientists are caught by, is the Tokyo University scientist did a study, which was published in the newspaper, which showed that there didn't need to be sidewalks because Japanese children, little children who are hit by cars, were mentally disturbed. And so it was a problem of parental care. Well, I mean, that's really extraordinary to us because we assume, we try to, our laws try to protect the elderly and the weak and children who might not be so alert. But in Japan, this kind of, this whole thing is, I could give you many kinds of examples of even the way the streets are and the gutters and no sidewalks. But to me, that's pretty extraordinary to say, well, it's the kid's fault for getting hit. Partly true, of course, you know.

[83:52]

When we're talking about feeling and a field way of organizing things, we're talking also, I think, about a mind-body culture and not just a conceptual culture as we have primarily conceptual culture. And in such a mind-body culture, as many Buddhist books say, for instance, you touch nirvana with your body. Buddhist practice is very related to this kind of position in which you can sit straight, your back straight, and you're breathing, and so that you can become still and see what's happening when you're still. When you have a body culture, there are many things which are interesting. One is either because of genetics or because of culture, Japanese people seem physically quicker and physically more alert than we do. they count money absolutely incredibly rapidly you go into a bank and you're sort of not supposed to count your change in Japan at least that some people feel that way because Japan's very honest and you just trust that your change is right that's one sort of you know right politeness level and you know I'd go into a bank and I'd ask for you know 30,000 yen or something and the girl would pick up a roll of bills and go

[85:16]

like that. And I'd say, well, you know, I'd go outside the bank a while.

[85:23]

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